Synopses & Reviews
This practical, how-to text, informed by current ideas on teacher research, outlines and illustrates strategies and experiences to foster literacy teachersa (TM) abilities to conduct action research in their classrooms or schools. Part I overviews the theory and significance of teacher research and provides a description and rationale for the various activities and experiences that support learning to become teacher researchers. Part II features chapters written by a diverse group of teacher-researchers, interwoven with short commentaries by the editors that address particularly pertinent features or aspects of these reports for novice teacher-researchers in the process of learning to do teacher inquiry. These chapters make visible the various tensions and vulnerabilities that novice teacher researchers experience and how the activities in this book may help address them.
Becoming a Teacher Researcher in Literacy Teaching and Learning:
- Covers the teacher research process from the initial proposal to writing up the report
- Illustrates a range of literacy topics in reading and writing and grade levels
- Features voices of teacher researchers who have gone through the process, and their candid remarks about how activities helped (or not)
- Offers ideas and examples on writing up the genre of teacher research as publishable or presentable work, emphasizing how to provide a credible account that incorporates not only successes, new understandings, and triumphs, but also the bumps, tensions, and vulnerabilities in the process
- Addresses important concepts in teacher inquiry methodology by showing how teacher-researchers operationalized and lived them in their inquiries
- Discusses ethical issues involved in teacher research
- Includes forms readers can duplicate for use, and provides space for users to jot down their own reactions, responses, and questions
Synopsis
Designed to facilitate teachers? efforts to meet the actual challenges and dilemmas they face in their classrooms, Becoming a Teacher Researcher in Literacy Teaching and Learning:
- provides background information and key concepts in teacher research
- covers the how-to strategies of the teacher research process from the initial proposal to writing up the report as publishable or presentable work
- illustrates a range of literacy topics and grade levels
- features twelve reports by teacher researchers who have gone through the process, and their candid remarks about how activities helped (or not)
- helps teachers understand how knowledge is constructed socially in their classrooms so that they can create instructional communities that promote all students? learning.
Addressing the importance of teacher research for better instruction, reform, and political action, this text emphasizes strategies teachers can use to support and strengthen their voices as they dialogue with others in the educational community, so that their ideas and perspectives may have an impact on educational practice both locally in their schools and districts and more broadly.